Sex Channels Booted Off Cable in L.A.
L O S A N G E L E S, Nov. 4, 2000 -- The city’s largest cable operator, AdelphiaCommunications, has stopped running the lone sex channel on itssystems here despite the industrywide trend to offer more of thehighly profitable adult fare, officials said today.
Adelphia finished dropping the popular Spice channel earlierthis fall from systems that reach up to 1.2 million subscribers inLos Angeles and Orange counties.
The company, run by a conservative rural Pennsylvania family,notified city regulators this summer that it would be replacingSpice with the Health Network.
It’s Adelphia’s most sweeping programming change since the firmacquired Century Communications a year ago, becoming the region’slargest cable operator within the greater Los Angeles area.
Company Policy
A customer service representative, who declined to give his fullname, said today the company does not offer sex channels in mostparts of the country. Adelphia temporarily honors subscriptions tosuch fare when it acquires other cable services, as was the casewith Century Communications.
Adelphia eventually drops the adult channel after severalmonths, the representative said.
The policy is economically risky because the adult pay-per-viewbusiness is soaring, with industrywide revenues doubling in thelast three years to more than $500 million this year.
Cable operators generally keep 85 percent of the $6 to $8 theycollect from each Spice pay-per-view customer. Some adult channelseven allow operators to keep 90 percent of the revenues.
By comparison, cable operators keep about 50 percent of therevenues from mainstream pay-per-view movies, which cost $3.99each. The split is similar for premium channels such as HBO.
Adelphia spokesman Paul Heimel did not immediately respond tointerview requests today.
John Rigas, the 75-year-old patriarch of the Coudersport,Pa.-based company, is known for being morally opposed to what heconsiders exploitative adult programming that undermines corefamily values.
Playboy: Adelphia ‘Anti-Adult’
Officials with Playboy Television Networks, the owner of twoadult brands — Spice and Playboy — that are widely carried overcable and satellite TV, said that Adelphia is the only one of thenation’s major pay TV providers with a policy against sexuallyexplicit fare.
“It has been their long-term policy to be anti-adult,” saidJim English, the president of Playboy Television Networks, which isbased in Los Angeles. “The only answer I have for consumers issatellite.”
Industry analysts said the move will likely hurt Adelphia in itscompetitive battle against satellite services, which generallydevote more channels to the sex genre than their cablecounterparts.
Some industry officials criticized Adelphia for playing thecensor, noting that HBO, Showtime and Cinemax have shows that equalPlayboy in raunchiness.
Paul Janis, interim general manager of the city’s InformationTechnology Agency, said that a handful of Adelphia customers hadcomplained about the removal of Spice.
Cable operators have free discretion overtheir networks, within legal limits, but are obligated to notify customers and the cityin advance of any changes in their channel lineups.